Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Lincoln and Seward did their best to spin the arrival of the Russian fleet to their advantage. Northerners welcomed the Russian sailors with huge rallies and elegant balls. In New York, the seamen paraded down Broadway as cheering spectators thronged the surrounding streets and rooftops. “The moving pageant,” the Times reported, “rolled in a glittering stream down the broad thoroughfare between banks of upturned human faces, the trappings of the equipages, the gold and silver epaulets of the Muscovite guests and the sabers, helmets, and bayonets of the escort reflecting back in unnumbered dazzling lines the glory of the evening sun.” Mary Lincoln, who was visiting New York that fall, climbed aboard a Russian frigate to welcome the visitors. Surrounded on the quarterdeck by a crowd of sailors braced by Turkish cigarettes and Italian wines, she offered a toast to Czar Alexander II.

  At a ball in honor of the officers at the New York Academy of Music, champagne corks popped as women dressed in velvet and crinoline spun the diminutive Russian sailors around a hall decked out in Russian and American flags. The whole place was flickering with diamonds. The night’s caterer, Delmonico’s, had constructed portraits of Lincoln and Alexander out of confectionary sugar. It was almost possible to forget that a devastating war was still raging in the American heartland. “The good feeling of the people of Russia,” Cassius Marcellus Clay reported home from St. Petersburg, had been “greatly heightened by the cordial reception given by our countrymen to the Russian officers.”83

  For a time, the whole Northeast was “seized with a Russian mania,” the New York Herald reported. The sailors eventually made their way south to Washington, where Lincoln’s cabinet officers made sure to flaunt them as conspicuously as possible. The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, threw an event for the Russians in early December. John Hay noted that the sailors “have vast absorbent powers and are fiendishly ugly.” The following night, Hay spotted the Russians at the theater. The men, he told his diary, “were disgustingly tight and demonstrative.”

  Members of Lincoln’s inner circle were initially unsure about what impression the visit would make on French statesmen. Welles told his diary that there was “something significant” in the maneuver, but added that its “effect on France and the French policy we shall learn in due time. It may moderate; it may exasperate.” Still, he exulted: “God bless the Russians.” The sailors’ presence, along with the North’s continuing good fortunes on the battlefield, eventually seemed to work a kind of magic on foreign diplomats in Washington. The French minister, Henri Mercier, appeared to be gaining a grudging respect for Seward. “Il est très sage,” Mercier was heard saying of Seward—“He is very clever.” Hay noted that by mid-December the diplomats had “stopped blackguarding and abusing” the secretary of state. Even those who still did not like Seward, Hay noted, had been “forced to respect.”84

  Napoleon, too, was beginning to respect the burgeoning power of the North. “I realize that I have got myself into a tight place,” he admitted as winter approached. He complained, according to one visitor, about the “great mistakes” that had been made in the North American project. The French emperor acknowledged privately that he could no longer maintain control of Mexico. “The affair,” he insisted, “has got to be liquidated.” The emperor hoped to withdraw most French troops, while at the same time training Mexicans to fill the foreigners’ role. Napoleon’s “Mexicanization” plan, one historian has noted, bears eerie similarities to Vietnamization plans of the 1970s—and, it should be said, modern American efforts to train the Iraqi and Afghan militaries.85

  With Banks’s troops camped out along the Mexican border, the risk of miscalculation on both sides posed a serious threat. “If raids were to take place on Mexico from Texas,” Napoleon worried to Maximilian, “I might suddenly find myself at war with the Americans—a war which would spell disaster to the interests of France and would have no possible object.”

  Lincoln and Seward shared the French emperor’s fears. In late November, the American consul in Matamoros—the Mexican town just across the border from Banks’s men in Brownsville—asked the American commander for protection. Banks trained his guns on the Mexican castle just opposite his encampment. An exasperated Seward later briefed the president on the incident. “Firing on the town,” the secretary of state complained to Lincoln, “would involve us in a war with the Lord knows who.”

  “Or rather,” the president shot back, “the Lord knows who not.”86

  The Imperial Cat’s Paw

  On December 3, 1863, horses attached to ropes and pulleys hoisted Thomas Crawford’s bronze statue Freedom to the top of the just-completed Capitol dome in Washington. Cannon from all the Union forts surrounding the city rumbled in tribute. As a symbolic gesture of the Federal government’s rising strength, the ceremony was hard to top. The president, meanwhile, was finally beginning to win the respect he sought from foreign powers. New Jersey politician James Scovel wrote Lincoln from London reporting that British liberal Richard Cobden had been speaking “most warmly in praise of you,” lauding the American president’s “coolness and forecast at the time of the Trent affair. He highly approves of your policy of ‘one war at a time.’ ” Scovel, who had traveled Britain that autumn speaking at mass meetings, told the president that his audiences “always applauded at the mention of Abraham Lincoln’s name.”87

  On December 8, five days after the Capitol dome was completed, Lincoln sent his annual message to Congress. The section on foreign affairs made note of the North’s improving fortunes. The Union alone now possessed more “armored vessels” than “any other power,” according to the message. American iron and timber supplies were also “superior to any other nation.” As recently as the last session of Congress, Europeans had looked upon the war-torn United States with “pity.” Now, however, the “tone of public sentiment” abroad was “much improved.” Naval secretary Gideon Welles observed in his diary that autumn that the American ironclads and “heavy ordnance” were having “a tranquilizing effect” on the “tone and temper” of British and French statesmen.88

  And yet the French presence in Mexico continued to trouble the president and his inner circle. Even Sumner, who went out of his way to placate the French emperor, found himself tangling with Napoleon’s representative in Washington. When Mercier argued to the Massachusetts senator around Christmastime that “a division of the Union is inevitable,” Sumner “snapped his fingers at” Mercier and “told him he knew not our case,” Welles wrote in his diary. “Palmerston and Louis Napoleon,” the naval secretary scribbled, “are the two bad men in this matter. The latter is quite belligerent in his feelings, but fears to be insolent towards us unless England is also engaged.”89

  Lincoln, too, remained preoccupied with Mexico. On New Year’s Day 1864, the president held his annual reception at the White House. A former State Department employee recorded in his diary that Lincoln quietly quizzed the Mexican minister about his country’s affairs as the receiving line wound its way through the ground floor. The entire exchange was accomplished “stealthily and sotto voce,” the diarist observed, “in a manner as if Lincoln was afraid of the other diplomats.” The Mexican, who supported the republican forces that were fighting to oust the French, explained to the president that the rebels were making good progress. “Oh, I am very glad,” Lincoln replied, somewhat undiplomatically. “I wish you may have the best of the invaders.”90

  Some hawks in Congress, however, were determined to launch an invasion of their own. In January 1864, they renewed their efforts to pass a resolution calling for Napoleon’s expulsion from Mexico. James A. McDougall, a California senator and old acquaintance of Lincoln’s from his days as a lawyer on the Illinois circuit, authored a motion condemning the Mexican venture. The French emperor, McDougall insisted, should be immediately ordered to withdraw his forces. If he refused, “on or before the 15th day of March next it will become the duty of the Congress of the United States of America to declare war against the Government of France.”91
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br />   McDougall was not one of the Senate’s shining lights. Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning once recalled watching the California Democrat stumble “quite drunk” onto the chamber floor. A correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union reported that McDougall “has only been in the Senate a few times this winter, then drunk, booted like a dragoon and spurred like a Spanish vaquero. He falls drunk from his horse on Pennsylvania Avenue. In a word, he is the first drunkard in Washington.” A dedicated expansionist, for months McDougall had been challenging Lincoln to take on Napoleon in Mexico. He warned that French forces could easily establish a foothold on the Colorado River and then swiftly conquer San Diego. “We have nothing of value to lose by a French war,” McDougall declared in a speech on the Senate floor. “We have everything to gain, and for one I am unwilling to avoid it.”92

  Even if McDougall was only “little more than a drunken clown,” as one historian puts it, his blustering unnerved French diplomats. Seward was forced to dispatch a stream of letters to the American representatives in Paris emphasizing that Lincoln did not share Congress’s belligerent stance. The congressional resolutions, the secretary of state told his minister in France, were “not in harmony with the policy of neutrality, forbearance, and conciliation which the president has so faithfully pursued.” A few weeks later, he again warned his men in the field that there would be a “legislative demonstration” against the French project in Mexico. Seward insisted that only “executive moderation” was managing to restrain the popular animosity toward Napoleon.93

  In some cases, however, even members of Lincoln’s own diplomatic corps had been urging Congress to take a harder line. The previous autumn James Shepherd Pike, Lincoln’s envoy to the Netherlands, had written home to a Maine senator complaining about the submissive tone “which seems to be taken in the United States over the suppression of Mexican independence and the erection of an empire upon its ruins.” In late January, Edward Lee Plumb, the businessman who sometimes worked as a State Department translator, urged Charles Sumner to “let it be known to the world that the people of the United States have not abandoned the Monroe Doctrine, that they do not and cannot look with favor or indifference on the attempt of a European power to overthrow republican institutions and introduce a European form of government into their neighborhood and sister republic.”94

  Lincoln and Seward did their best to hold a firm line against the hawks in Congress, the State Department, and elsewhere. Sumner backed them up. “Sir,” Sumner complained to one hard-liner, “have we not war enough already on our hands, without needlessly and wantonly provoking another?” He managed to kill McDougall’s resolution, complaining that there was “madness in the proposition” of taking on Napoleon while still fighting a war at home. Mexican envoy Matías Romero, meanwhile, was growing increasingly impatient with the Lincoln administration’s refusal to take on Napoleon. He groused to his superiors that Sumner’s “fear of France makes him as condescending with that nation as Seward.”95

  The tug-of-war over Mexico wore Lincoln down. To one journalist, Noah Brooks, the president complained that the senators trying to gin up a war with France sapped his strength. Lincoln imagined himself as the target of a pack of hungry predators. The president told Brooks that he dreaded the encounters, in which pushy senators “darted at me with thumb and finger, picked out their especial piece of my vitality, and carried it off.”96

  Lincoln’s scheme for colonization off the coast of Haiti gave Congress more ammunition to attack the president. Lincoln had authorized U.S. funds for Kock’s adventure on the Île à Vache but had not paid much attention to the details of the contract. As it turned out, conditions on the island were miserable. Colonists, attacked by disease-carrying bugs, begged to come home; many of them died on the island. The rest forced Kock to flee. Lincoln eventually had to order a Union ship to the Caribbean to clean up the bungled operation. Congress, already on Lincoln’s case over Mexico, pounced. The body eventually launched an investigation and froze further funds for colonization amid a frenzied round of bureaucratic politics.97

  Still, newspaper correspondents in the capital marveled at the way Lincoln personally seemed to escape from the most strident criticisms. More often, Seward found himself taking the blame for the administration. While Lincoln and Seward crafted their foreign policies together, a writer for the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch observed, “President Lincoln is not held responsible” when plans unfolded badly. Part of the reason, the reporter speculated, was Lincoln’s clever style of meeting individually with Seward or other cabinet ministers, rather than in large councils: “This way of doing business is not relished by the old fogies; but it relieves the administration, and, consequently, the president. It was not Lincoln’s administration, but Seward, who let the French set aside the Monroe Doctrine in Mexico”—or so the thinking went, which probably suited the president just fine.98

  Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the French emperor was preparing to begin the next stage of his Mexican operation. Maximilian and Charlotte had remained in Europe—at their castle in Miramar, along the Adriatic coast of present-day Italy—while French forces worked to pacify Mexico. Now, just as Napoleon was losing interest in the project, they finally prepared to depart and claim their thrones in the New World. Maximilian’s father-in-law, King Leopold of Belgium, warned the Austrian archduke that the mission was looking increasingly perilous. Napoleon, Leopold cautioned, was “bent upon withdrawing his troops from Mexico, for if things go badly, then he is exonerated.” Leopold urged his son-in-law to get a promise “officially and in writing” from the emperor confirming French support for the venture. Otherwise, Leopold warned, Maximilian would simply be acting as the imperial “cat’s-paw.”99

  Maximilian, perhaps convinced by his father-in-law’s warning, began to get cold feet. Napoleon no longer seemed committed to maintaining the French military presence. The Austrian government, meanwhile, was also growing wary of the project. Maximilian’s family told the archduke that if he proceeded to Mexico, he would have to renounce his place in line for the Austrian throne. Wags on both sides of the Atlantic began referring to Maximilian as the Archdupe.

  Maximilian wrote to Napoleon and tried to back out. The French emperor, however, viewed the Austrian archduke as his best hope for sloughing off the project. Napoleon scolded Maximilian that it was now “impossible” for him to give up on the mission. “Your Imperial Highness,” the emperor wrote to Maximilian in March, “has entered into engagements which you are no longer free to break. What would you really think of me, if, when Your Imperial Highness had already reached Mexico, I were suddenly to say that I can no longer fulfill the conditions to which I have set my signature!”

  Finally, in mid-April, Maximilian agreed to renounce the Austrian throne and depart for Mexico. On April 14, 1864, he prepared to board the Austrian vessel Novara and sail for the New World. Crowds thronged the streets in Miramar, and a hundred porters carted the imperial baggage onto the ship. Women threw flowers and a band played the Mexican imperial anthem as Maximilian and Charlotte strode under an elegant red-and-gold sunshade and onto the Novara. For the imperial couple, it was an emotional parting. As their boat slipped away from the shore, past a flotilla of tiny fishing boats, Charlotte cried out, “Look at poor Max! How he is weeping!”100

  As Maximilian and Charlotte were preparing to depart Miramar, the Union armies suffered a series of troubling setbacks. General Banks, after finally establishing a foothold near the Mexican border, launched an ill-advised campaign along Louisiana’s Red River (named for the color of its muddy water). Union commanders wanted to send Banks up the river to Shreveport, in the state’s northwest corner, a maneuver designed at least partly to place the French emperor on guard. From there, Banks and his men could join a Union attack on strategically critical Mobile, Alabama.

  Banks’s men, however, never reached their destination. As the spring rain poured down on the Union troopers, they sank up to their ankles in red slime. On April 8,
Confederate defenders launched a counterattack near Mansfield, Louisiana. The Federals, one witness recalled, degenerated into “a disorganized mob of screaming, sobbing, hysterical, pale, terror-stricken men.” Banks found himself desperately waving his sword in the air, trying unsuccessfully to convince his men to hold fast. The officer’s troops ultimately mocked their commander as “Napoleon P. Banks.”101

  The Red River debacle frustrated Lincoln. After the president got the news of the campaign’s failure, he read aloud from “The Fire-Worshippers,” a section of Thomas Moore’s romantic epic, Lalla Rookh, including the lines “Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour, / I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay.…”102 In Congress, Henry Winter Davis, chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, had already been scolding Lincoln for his hapless Mexican policy. The congressman convinced the House of Representatives to pass a measure denouncing “the deplorable events now transpiring in the Republic of Mexico”—a provocative gesture that Lincoln and Seward would have preferred to have avoided. The secretary of state grumbled that “party politicians think that the Mexican question affords them a fulcrum, and they seem willing to work their lever reckless of dangers to the country.” Some members of the national media also chimed in. The New York Herald complained of “the namby-pamby, wishy-washy foreign policy of the administration.”103

  Seward continued to assure his diplomats in Paris that the White House did not share the aggressive posture of Congress and the penny press, although the secretary of state acknowledged that the French occupation remained “a source of continued irritation.” Legislators, he wrote, were only reflecting widespread popular pressure to confront the French armies. Seward predicted that—as in the case of the Trent affair—the executive would ultimately be able to steer the ship of state safely through the crisis. In any case, he added, if the most determined expansionists would just display a little patience, they would ultimately get their way. “Five years, ten years, twenty years hence,” Seward wrote in a confidential dispatch to his consul in Paris, “Mexico will be opening herself as cheerfully to American immigration as Montana and Idaho are now. What European power can then maintain an army in Mexico capable of resisting material and moral influences of emigration?”104